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Breaking Free of Outlook

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10 pointsterpua8 comments

I assumed this was going to discuss all aspects of Outlook. If all you're using Outlook for is e-mail you're not "wedded" to it; hundreds of programs can give you an identical interface. I liked outlook because of the excellent integration of all its PIM aspects: calendar, tasks, that sort of thing. I currently use Thunderbird with Lightning for the calendar and tasks, but I still think Outlook was best at the overall PIM experience

I wish Lightning would support the 64bit architecture. No calendar for me in Thunderbird :(

I use Outlook for the address book (and the calendar to a lesser extent), for the reason that pretty much every application can import from/export to Outlook. No other PIM comes remotely close. It's the only reasonable way to keep my phone, my PDA, my website, etc in sync.

I use Outlook mainly due to the mobile integration. It's worth a lot to me to know that if I put a task or calendar appointment into Outlook or my phone, it will pop up immediately on the other. Mobile Outlook on WinMo 6 is pretty nice too, much better than Gmail's mobile client.

Most of what he says about Gmail never requiring backup, being the same from any PC, having spam filtering, etc, is true with any decent hosted Exchange Server. Mine comes with web access and a Barracuda spam filter, both of which are great.

Gmail does have better search. That's still Outlook's pain point.

Speaking of which, what are you guys using for shared calendaring? Google Apps? I'm still a little leery of tying business data / processes like that to a we-own-the-internet company. I've thought about Bongo, perhaps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongo_%28software%29).

Google would immediately be out of business if they betrayed your trust in a way like that. Besides, you're already entrusting your emails to them if you use Gmail. That's probably a bigger deal.

I don't use any Google apps, or even have a Google account. It's not so much a matter of trust; it's a matter of usage. Google looks like a search company, but in practice they're a data-mining company for targeted advertisement.

On the whole I don't see a migration away from Exchange to Google Apps as a big win; they're both still platforms that lock you into a system that you don't control, but Google goes one step further and mines that data.

I don't mean "Google is Evil!" with that -- this is what their company is about, and it of course makes business sense for them. But for this sort of infrastructure I'd prefer not to rely on them. Hint: nobody seems to love MS, but their business seems to be doing quite well.

I was quite impressed with Zimbra Desktop, it is really worth a try.

The only reason I am not using it today is because I figured it would be a pain to migrate my current calendar, to-dos and address book to it, but Zimbra is the one I'd be using if I was starting from scratch today.

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